Last November Zondervan bought a community building platform from Mars Hill Church, named simply, The City. Zondervan has now re-launched The City out to the public. The service looks very promising, as a fully scalable service for churches of any size.

“The City enhances and deepens the community in your church that already exists. It isn’t merely online social networking; it’s literally community building software. Now your community groups and ministry service teams can continuously share life together as it unfolds. Whether it’s praying for one-another, discussing scripture, or whatever the need may be, The City is the catalyst for drawing your people together in deep, abiding community.”

I have personally seen this in place at Mars Hill and must say that the service is amazing. The only issue we can see is will your church be able to effectively move over to managing every aspect of your community online? We are hoping to have a full review of this service very soon. Stay tuned. Visit The City.

It has been awhile since our list real update, so now that things have calmed down over at Simple Church Marketing, we will be getting back to regular, daily updates to the blog! Last month we shared 45 Twitter Apps for Churches, today we wanted to share with you all top 10 pastors you should follow on Twitter. These pastors are very active with updates and have really embraced Twitter as a way to expand their reach and offer another way in which church members can connect to their pastor.

Yesterday we shared with you 45 Twitter App For Your Church, today we are going to share with you 21 Facebook Apps for Your Church! Facebook has overtaken MySpace as the major Social Network, with the majority of users over 18 years old. Just like MySpace, Facebook is a great way to connect to members of your community, help get your church name out there, and give your members another easy way to connect to each other. We hope that you find these apps of value and that they will help your ministry!

Today we share with you 45 Twitter apps that churches can benefit from! Twitter is a social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read other users’ updates known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 bytes in length. Updates are displayed on the user’s profile page and delivered to other users who have signed up to receive them. Senders can restrict delivery to those in their circle of friends.